Thoughts in a Haystack

Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is exercised about the report in the Chicago Sun-Times that, in the last year that same-sex marriage has been legal in the state of Illinois, "Same-sex spouses have been as young as 17 and as old as 93 ..."

Al opines that he "can understand how a 93-year-old could get legal permission to marry whether same-sex or otherwise in Cook County, Illinois, but how in the world are we now living in a situation in which at least one 17-year-old was legally married in a same-sex union in Cook County, Illinois in the last year."

You see,

From time to time one of the things we have to demonstrate about a false worldview is that it allows itself to have the phenomena of conflicting absolutes. That's one of the things that is very important about the Christian biblical worldview, we believe in absolutes but we don't believe in the possibility of those absolutes being in conflict with one another.

Absolutes ... in conflict? Like when Moses, barely off Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments, including "Thou shalt not kill," ordered the cold-blooded murder of, if the text is to be believed, some 30,000 young boys and male infants among the Midianite "little ones"?

Nope, no moral absolutes in conflict there! But Al insists:

[W]hen you're looking at the modern secular worldview there are conflicting absolutes and there's no question about it. And it comes up in a situation like this.

Where are the child protection advocates crying out against the crime -- or at least the abuse --of having a 17-year-old, according to their worldview, entered into a same-sex union by some kind of legal means in Cook County, Illinois in the year 2015? Most of those very same advocates point to some kind of marriage age such as that, even in a heterosexual union, as the evidence of some kind of social problem.

Well, the small problem is that, in Illinois, irrespective of whether it is a straight or gay marriage, the age of consent to marry is ... wait for it ... seventeen!

So, it is "child abuse" to allow "children" under eighteen to marry? Well, let's look (see link above) at some of the "godly" states:

Alabama: sixteen ...

Arkansas: sixteen ...

Georgia: sixteen ...

Kansas: sixteen ...

Kentucky: sixteen ...

Mississippi: sixteen ...

Oklahoma: sixteen ...

South Carolina: sixteen ...

West Virginia: sixteen ...

To be fair, a number of "Blue States" also set the age of marital consent at sixteen or seventeen and some "Red States" put it at eighteen.

The point is that Al Mohler, in his high "moral" dudgeon, can't be bothered to know what he is talking about.